Question: How is it possible to experience features from dreaming when we wake up?

Susan Cartwright answered on 20 Jun 2015:

I’m not sure quite what you mean by this question, so please ask a more detailed question if this answer doesn’t address what you meant.

We are not really sure what purpose dreaming serves, but there is a lot of support for the idea that it is at least partly to do with processing and assimilating new information, and perhaps dealing with emotional stresses that are hard to handle while awake. Therefore, a lot of dreams reflect real-life experiences, especially those from the previous day and those from about a week ago (oddly, your dreams are more likely to involve events from 1-2 days ago OR 5-7 days ago than they are events from 3-4 days ago – there must be two different processes or pathways involved here, but nobody really knows).

Because dreaming is associated with memory reprocessing, many of the people you “meet” in dreams are people you know – studies suggest about half of all dream characters are people the dreamer knows. Another third are “stock characters” (e.g. a policeman, a teacher) – not recognised by name, but playing a familiar social role. Only about a sixth are strangers.

So, since your dreams are processing events from real life, inhabited by characters from real life, it’s not at all surprising that subsequent events in real life may resemble events from dreams. Also, we usually can’t remember dreams – apparently you only really remember a dream if you wake up during or very soon after the dream, and you forget the details very quickly unless you write them down. However, some studies have reported that fragments of dreams can suddenly “surface” again later, which suggests that the memories are not lost but mislaid – they are there, but you can’t find them. It seems reasonable to me that having a later experience that resembles something that happened in a dream might trigger a memory of the dream, so that you would preferentially remember dreams that seemed to relate to subsequent events.